Gates Foundation-Backed CropIn Registers a 300% Growth

Backed by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Strategic Investment Fund (London & Seattle and Chiratae Ventures, SaaS-based agri-tech solutions provider, CropIn registers a 3X recurring revenue growth in the last five quarters, and aims to reach 6 million farmers by 2022 with 15 million acres being monitored through its platform. CropIn has partnered with over 185+ clients across 30 countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, enriching the lives of over 2.1 million farmers by digitizing over 5 million acres of farmlands.

 

The company, which first marked its global presence in late 2017, is today generating more than 50 percent of its current revenue from its international markets and plans to generate 70 percent in the next one year.

 

Krishna Kumar, founder & CEO, CropIn, said that their prospects had not seen a product like SmartFarm in the B2B space earlier that has the capability to solve complex supply-chain problems in the ag-ecosystem by impacting growers and their end customers to achieve per acre value through Traceability and Predictability. Getting them to trust the effectiveness of the product and integrate their solution with their digital strategy was the company’s biggest challenge in 2012. They approached big and small agri-businesses to validate our product market fit, and soon, one client after another, they saw their product being adopted seamlessly into their existing conventional systems, he said.

 

Interestingly, SmartFarm is a comprehensive digital farming technology that enables efficient farm management through digitization, empowers data-driven decision-making, and provides complete visibility of people, processes, and performance on the field.

 

After validating the effectiveness of CropIn’s products, the World Bank has chosen CropIn as the technology partner in the public-private partnership project of the Government of India and the World Bank. The project is aimed to bring a positive change in the farming practices of farmers in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, and successfully help them to adapt to the climatic changes and the associated unpredictability.

 

So far, CropIn has successfully partnered with government bodies and agribusinesses including but not limited to McCain, Syngenta, Firmenich, Bayer, BASF, Government of Karnataka, Central Government, and the World Bank. The company has carried out swift and successful technology implementations in the agri-tech space on a global scale. Apart from SmartFarm and SmartRisk, CropIn’s other core product offerings include SmartSales, mWarehouse and Acresquare.

 

Kumar said that 2018 was an important year for them in terms of reaching significant milestones. They didn't just mark their global presence but also launched their predictive and prescriptive solution, ‘SmartRiskTM’ that leverages Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics. SmartRiskTM is a next generation predictive product that is able to detect crops, predict crop health and estimate yield ahead of the harvest, that will provide valuable insights for the agri-industry, financial institutions, growers and policymakers, he said.